Chandler
strolls into Central Perk, a belly-bulge hanging over his brown belt as
the nasal sound of Phoebe warbling about smelly cats, prostitution, and
her dead mom rudely assault his eardrums. A strangely
stretched-foreheaded, pumped-lipped Monica, unfazed that two hours ago
she looked five years older and her husband was a slim-Jim, greets her
fat-boy with a kiss. I stare at the wonky scene through the glazed eyes
of a sitcom-marathon addict. Something’s off—like milk on the turn.

Then realization
hits me: I’m the problem. Or, more accurately,
my modern internet-based television habits are. Watching
back-to-back-to-sore-back-from-spending-all-day-in-bed Friends episodes
is corrupting the characters, plotlines and believability, of
conventional television shows.

From shit-kicking political fixer to egotistical, villainous floozy.

Once upon a time, traditional
television schedules were more powerful than Spanx. You sat down once a week, and they forgave a multitude of sins—like inconceivably
ridiculous storylines, fluctuating script quality, and
ballooning/shrinking/inexplicably absent/psychologically
ill-when-they’re-not-supposed-to-be characters. The week-long vacation
from Central Perk shenanigans proved just long enough for Chandler’s
inconsistent belly and chin to aggregate into a typical male weight and
Phoebe’s tendency to believe her dead gran was a cat she found on the
sidewalk to mellow into a believable personality.

Netflix,
Hulu and their gutter-dwelling illegal downloading cousins have a lot
to answer for. Their narrative-altering powers generalize far beyond
Cenral Perk as well. The
making of characters in television used to be a season-long, six-month
scheduled process. But when a season like ABC’s Scandal, starring Kerry
Washington as shit-kicking political fixer Olivia Pope, is eaten as a
single meal, Pope’s intoxicating, badass personality morphs into that of
an egotistical, villainous floozy.

Breakdown #57: Crazy Eyes Edition

Investing
a day instead of an hour-a-week in a show is like comparing having a
baby to looking after your next-door neighbor’s dog. Expectations of the
show warp from “treat time” to a dull slog. When you fall asleep to the
screams accompanying Dexter cling-filming and executing his nineteenth
victim of the night, you can’t taste the blood anymore. It’s okay to
clean dog poop up once in a while but Carrie Mathison’s ninth bipolar
breakdown on Homeland is as banal as puke on your shoulder after months of diaper changes. And downright boredom displaces pupil-pinned
incredulity at the implausibility of vegetarian Phoebe eating a bloody
steak because her brother’s triplets in her belly need it like a hole in
the head.

There’s
no end to the unscheduled TV marathon, excluding subscription
cancellation—and addicts don’t quit that easy. So unless I can unlearn
my bad habits, and revert to scheduled hour-long bites of unctuous
drama, the joy of buying into great television plots will positively
correlate with the degeneration of Olivia Pope’s morality. Am I sad?
Kind of. Will I stop? No.